Mysteries of Motion (72 page)

“Sleepers, awake!” Wert calls out. He’s taken to doing this each “morning.”

Everybody is except Soraya, who lives in sleep these days as in an old surplice. Gently, having to get up and step behind his own couch, he lays a hand on her cheek.

Up ahead, Gilpin bursts out laughing. The screen, which he’s always watching, now says
THE VIEW.
After a pause it corrects itself, adding the
ING.

Mulenberg yawns. “Wish to God I had some cologne.” His head looms over his seat-back. “Whatsit you have on, Oliphant?” Lately he calls her that. “Smell it all the way from here.”

“Cocoa butter. Soraya lent me it.” Her voice is lazy, deep in her chair.

Soraya laughs.

Yes, there’s a new intimacy here. Office party at Christmas. End of summer, the yacht club. Leaving Soon. Is he mad to think this, considering where they are? Not at all. It’s our way.

For Lievering is saying,
“Unser Gott im Himmel. Kaffee.”

They can smell it above their own odor, which isn’t a rank stench but a blanketed one of vinyl linings, bagged urine and sweat nullified.

Tuohy the medic, a Galley Wipe adhered round his crown pirate-style, is bearing in one of his plastic unmentionables, on it a row of the covered cups they collect their own test-specimen in. Gravity’s waiter himself, he lays the other hand’s forefinger against his nose. What’s wafting from his tray is no school-smelling emulsion. There’s one of him at every Embassy, and at least one of these celebrations. Wert’s reminded of a picnic at the base of Mt. Ararat, trundled over the Azerbaijani border with a load of
nun
bread, Jamison whisky and Kraft cheese from their post, and met by their compatriots from the Turkish side with Coca-Cola, a box of French almond-dragées from Ankara and a roast kid. Plus a tent, borne all the way by the beaming newest young guy from home, who when complimented, for the sun was fearsome and their side had only hats, said modestly: It’s our way. “And sugar—” Tuohy says. “And—well—cream.” He indicates the packets.

They all take it black. The old statement floats out like a caroling. The brew is strong, wineberry of their own earth.

Lievering, standing, has drunk up. Is there more? He whispers it. There is, though not enough for all. The ladies are served again. Wert watches the long Oliphant arm reach out, hand its portion to Lievering. Blinking back tears, he accepts.

Wert’s own cheek is damp. Whatever, they’re not going to down us. We’ll live in the little particulars, no matter from what source. So softened, or weakened, he awaits the viewing. A rumor that home will see it at the same instant has circulated from somewhere forward. The medic has gone. “I wonder—”

“What?” comes from Soraya behind him. But hers is only a murmur, marital.

What the social tenderness is, where it stands among the emotions? Between charity, and what else?—that brush with another which the gruffest of us must have. Which behind all the avowed reasons, even to a reform bill for humanity and to giving birth without pain, he believes has brought all of them here. The emotion under all the rest, though he would never say that to this wife. Such reflections are for his other one. “I—was wondering whether there was a medic like Tuohy sent to every room.”

“Room? No one’s ever called this cabin that before.” Veronica makes her laugh intentionally crude. Why does she do that, and as if she herself doesn’t know?

It occurs to Wert that he now knows the people here like a member of a congregation. From which, like any found wanting in loyalty, he may be about to be dispossessed. For who knows better than he that in even the smallest of statehoods the wise neither criticize the facts nor predict them? Diplomacy is what is practiced after-the-fact. Never be too right too soon—as any smart Uncle will tell you. The man who guesses what will happen will be blamed for it. No one will believe he has merely guessed.

Why should he have shouldered so early the burden of statehood, and of his country’s virtue, as the true burden and virtue of his own life? Was it the Pledge of Allegiance, said solemn and breast-crossed in the sunlit classroom, with spring flickering outside on the Civil War monument? Or the stunted primer, with its echoes of Edmund Burke. Or the old canvas of a family member obscurely at the Treaty of Paris, whose vast white-weskited abdomen hung in the dining room at the level of young William’s eye? It had had a hole in it.

“Hey, Mole—” Veronica says, “come on in.”

Mole, swanning in his long neck, follows with the gosling rest of him. “I—just wanted to check. Seen anything yet?”

“Have you?”

“No, sir.” He still calls Wert sir. “Hear they’re going to show us the official film of our own liftoff. Before they show us the whole ship.”

“So we’re in touch again.”

“I believe so, sir.” Mole’s no longer debonair. “Cabin Two’s not talking.”

“Or whistling?” Though Gilpin gets messages, he’s not been forward since the first day, nor invited.

“Take my seat, Mole.” Lievering gets up. “I’m going forward.” There are no spare seats in Cabin Six.

“Or—mine?” Gilpin says, hesitant. He knows he’s a liability. “You’ve both been on EVA.” He admires them for it. He’s not a man who despises the prowess he doesn’t have. “Must be tired.”

“Not Lievering—” Mole says. “He thrives on it.”

“Find anything?” Wert asked.

Lievering turns. His eyes glitter like the eyes of racing drivers when lifted from their cars at Le Mans. They already have a view in them. “Nothing to repair.”

“The tile—” Mole said. “I
saw
it. Nothing wrong with it.” Like most of the young, he loiters well. He’s come to be with them for the viewing. It’s touching, how at any crisis he prefers to be in Cabin Six. But Wert can’t offer. His place is with his wife. This wife, a distant blue-eyed voice reminds him.

“You can have half my seat,” Veronica drawls.

They all hoot, except Mole. A Foget couch can’t be divided.

Soraya stands up. “I am going to the bath. No, Mole, my pleasure. Sit here.”

“Go on, Mole. She doesn’t want to see.” Wert stands up, putting an arm around her. Up to now he’s been careful not to emphasize their coupledom. He stares down at his brown-eyed wife, admiring both his wives for the rhythmic instinct with which they use self-sacrifice.

“You will tell me.” She starts forward. “And, Veronica, you change seats with Wert. Mole won’t mind the smell.” Her merry look has the iron mirth of ranks of matchmakers behind it.

They both do as told, just in time. The video, unfolding to wide lens, no longer looks bumbling. Used to its single-line clichés, they are awed, ready to meet themselves.

The camera begins like any travelogue, lyrically scudding coastlines, bridging alps. Its intention is at once plain—to dismiss the Earth. But on that they aren’t amateurs.
Isn’t
that Italy’s San Marco Platform?…
That’s
off east of Kenya, only for satellites
Ah
—Thumba Equatorial Rocket-Launching Station, India…Mar del Plata, Argentina,
or used to be.
Where the joint Apollo-Soyuz with the U.S.S.R. was launched,
back then…
The U.S.S.R. does not appear. Australia does. And now again they are at sea. No ships. Cloud.

“Europe has disappeared,” Wert says, with wry intention. Not even Gilpin bothers to echo him—for here they are: NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Houston. A President picked it. They circle it, long enough for Oliphant to whisper, They lost a piece of our action, Mole; they’re no longer set to bring us in.

And now—why it’s Greenbelt, Maryland, where we first started sending hopeful signals to other worlds. One of the symbols they, send, Wert remembers, resembles an ankh. “Much bigger installations now in Arizona,” he hears Oliphant mutter. “But other worlds have not yet come forward.”

Cabin Six falls still. Back and forth we go, along our own dear country’s edge, the rest of the world annulled, as in any love affair.

“There it is, from the sea,” Gilpin breathes. “Gantry Row.”

It is a beautiful coastline. Flocks of birds. They approach at dusk.

“What are those shapes?” Lievering says. “I never saw anything like.”

“Lost EVAS,” Gilpin answers. “Look.”

The camera is slow and grand now, hovering in a magnificent sunset. Below they spot a kind of ladder, with ungainly squares at its sides. They near it. They pass it. “Crawler Transport to move the old
Saturn V
rocket,” Oliphant says. “Only about forty feet high. They called it ‘The Train Wreck.’ And there, that tiny job, the old Lunar Model Mission-Simulator, I think.”

Mole says softly, “I been in it. You can move the moon’s landscape past you by the controls.”

The thing is full of birds. So is another ancient sculpture, pretty with vines. Gilpin and Oliphant exclaim at it.

“What the—” Mulenberg rouses himself. “Can’t they find anything better?”

“Model of the old
Vanguard
dud,” Gilpin said. “Blew the men up on launch pad. Don’t think the camera realizes what it’s looking at.”

Mole says softly: “They’re photoing the birds.”

“Twenty miles of Teflon-coated wire were in it,” Oliphant whispers clear. “Water-glycol system to protect on reentry, from the intense heat. Glycol’s corrosive, and its dry residues are combustible. They also used non-certified paints, epoxy and tape.”

“How do you know all this,
Ronchen!”

The two back couches are silent. It must be the endearment makes her hesitate. “I wrote an article on it.”

The camera is now taking them into fog. “Maintenance crew of the
Vanguard
were overworked,” Oliphant continues in a drone. “And said to have been drinking cleaning alcohol, ninety proof. Afterwards, a leftover wrench was found in the spacecraft. According to the House Investigation Committee.”

“They are very proud of still having the birds,” Mole said.

“I find you two—uncalled for,” Mulenberg said. “Your attitude.”

“The report was called
NASA Oversight,”
Veronica said.

On camera, the lights of a great, sweeping peninsula are now below.

Wert says: “Now, now, folks. Here we are. Canaveral.”

Once again Gilpin notes the dish-antennae on their triangular turrets. “We go much deeper in space, they’ll have to radio-impulse symbol language to
us.”

Mulenberg snaps, “Now then. Merritt Island. Four miles from the sea. And there’s the new VAB.”

“Par
don?”
Lievering.

“Vehicle Assembly Building. The
Courier
was put together in it. You could fit a pyramid in it. Or a whole thunderstorm. Or that new piece of ordnance called ‘The Blind Boy.’”

“Whatever
for,”
Mole says.

“To blow up troubled rockets, for one thing.” Her voice comes low and rich.

“Troubled?” Mole says.

Can’t stop the two of them, Wert thinks. It’s a wooing. Do civil administrators do the marrying? Not that those two would bother, but on habitat there’ll be chapbooks for conduct. All the rulebooks of the world, to be done again. He should groan, yet it dazzles him. A clean slate. He should know better—he does. Yet it shimmers before him. That white hero-hall of the human mechanism, with all the old inscriptions coming on again, slow.

“Here
we
are,” Mulenberg says.
“That’s
whatever for.”

On the screen, the launch pad is still empty, the
Courier
not yet arrived. The pad is a concrete base which has been compared to a Mayan temple. Any craft on it will stand slightly above terrain. Underneath is the flame deflector, brilliant yellow. Nearby is the gangling service tower and its companion gantry, red and clumsy, though with a white room inside. Those huge tanks in the distance store fuel. Those asbestos ones are for viewers. And rescuers.

Here it comes: The Roll-out. Theirs.

Looking out from Mission Control, there would be no human scale by which to measure it. The way soldier ants look, huge, crawling a white asphalt day in summer Georgia, with the street cleared by the sun’s cannon. Inch by inch now, slow as lava, the towering mass. In its blind self-knowledge it is not unlike a waterspout. When did it stop? For it has stopped.

How it and we loom. Universe, accept us into your quantity.

The dawn is behind us. The view is from the east.

WE HAVE LIFTOFF

Someone in the Firing Room back there must have said that. It sounded like surf.

They watch themselves soar.

The screen goes blank. Cabin Six won’t see how its rocket dropped away into the ocean to join or not join the recoverable. The cabin waits, like hide-and-seekers closeted. It knows it is here, to be found.

“Those onion-domes back there,” Lievering said hoarsely, “those were the tracking-ships.”

Have they slept again? Wert, missing Soraya, checks the watch he’s allowed to wear here, constructed on habitat. Since the fire on the flight deck destroyed some circuits, the
Courier
has used the backup system, which sounds like ship’s bells. Only fifteen minutes have passed. Should he recall Soraya from the Hygiene Unit? Better not. The baby has made her boss of herself. Also, like many men from his region, the women, black and white both, have trained him to believe that women apprehend everything. If after Jenny he hadn’t let women into his serious life sooner, that must be why. Like those Irishmen who marry late out of their respect for the church, but not too late to have a large family—out of respect for it.

“Do you suppose—that coffee? I feel unwontedly calm,” Gilpin says.

“Oh no,” Wert answers at once, out of Embassy habit. Allay panic where you can. “End of journey stress maybe. The brain takes care of it. I dropped off, too, actually. Did anyone else?”

Oliphant thinks she has not.

“Indeed not—” Mulenberg says.

“Are we all awake now?”

Lievering has to be roused.

Two cups. No one likes to say it. Maybe only one of the natural herbal restoratives their contracts specified. “I like to be forewarned,” Gilpin said.

“Mole?”

“I have been awake,” Mole said.

“I still would drink that
Kaffee,”
Lievering murmurs.
“Entschuldigen Sie, bitte!
The screen!”